It would be OK if we could trust the hardware makers to keep to standards. I don't trust. I am a fan of hard wiring things to ensure that they are right and stay being right. I'd put the jumpers on the HD to Single Master if I were you.

Unsolved mysteries of the Universe, No 13 :-
How many remakes of Anna Karenina does the World need?

I had a 2000 HP PC with SMART enabled; it began to warn me of problems after about 10 years; as I had everything backed up and wasn't using it other than as an archive, I carried on accessing it from time to time until I got round to replacing the hard disk.

Thanks for such tools; when I ran DOS, I had to wait until the problems manifested themselves before I knew there was a problem.

smartmontools is a package, install it in the usual way. smartctl is the program in that package used to run and check the SMART tests. If you're not comfortable with the command line (the smartctl man page does present a bewildering array of options) you can use gsmartctl, a GUI front end.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

nelz wrote:smartmontools is a package, install it in the usual way. smartctl is the program in that package used to run and check the SMART tests. If you're not comfortable with the command line (the smartctl man page does present a bewildering array of options) you can use gsmartctl, a GUI front end.

At the moment there probably are no errors, not in the data. But dd takecs forever and copies all your filesystem fragmentation as well. Best to use Clonezilla, or even plain old rsync, to copy things across.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

nelz wrote:At the moment there probably are no errors, not in the data. But dd takecs forever and copies all your filesystem fragmentation as well. Best to use Clonezilla, or even plain old rsync, to copy things across.

Picked up a new 500GB HDD (another $100 I didn't really want to spend...) and downloaded a copy of Clonezilla yesterday.